Sponsor 61 - Making the Tor network faster & more reliable for users in Internet-repressive places

In this project, the Tor Project aims to make the Tor network faster for users with slow connections and old devices by:

• Streamlining the tuning o- f the network;
• Deploying smarter methods for balancing traffic;
• Evaluating and implementing promising performance and scalability research;
• Proactively detecting, diagnosing, and resolving user-facing performance issues.

We meet the first Monday of the month. More information at http://kfahv6wfkbezjyg4r6mlhpmieydbebr5vkok5r34ya464gqz6c44bnyd.onion/p/sponsor61-meeting-pad

Weekly status meetings in irc. More information at https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-netteam-2020.1-keep

Objective 1: Improve user-facing performance metrics by streamlining the tuning of the Tor network.

• O1.1: Optimize user-facing performance by tuning parameters of previously deployed Tor network improvements
• O1.2: Ensure quick deployment of performance enhancements by improving how we test and deploy efficiency adjustments to the network.

Objective 2: Decrease latency for end users by deploying smarter load balancing mechanisms.

• O2.1: Reduce the number of slow and extremely slow sessions for our users by developing and deploying load balancing improvements.

Objective 3: Evaluate and implement selected research solutions for performance and scalability with the highest impact for our users.

• O3.1: Evaluate performance improvements presented in research literature.
• O3.2: Implement promising performance improvements from evaluation in O3.1.

Objective 4: Improve our ability to proactively detect, diagnose, and resolve user-facing performance issues.

• O4.1: Improve and implement network health monitoring and scanning.
• O4.2: Find and fix performance-impacting issues and bugs discovered from monitoring and scanning.